We polled these and, at least as we phrased them, they’re all fairly popular. Or, no less popular than the opposite. (Lots of uncertainty or neutrality.)
I'll go for expanded guest worker programs as soon as we get rid of birthright citizenship. As long as guest workers can make anchor babies, they're not really temporary guests.
> Part of the growing dysfunction of Congress is that on a practical level, the United States’ policymaking process is meant to work via a series of ad hoc elite bargains between elected officials. There are other ways for legislatures to work, but we don’t have the institutions to support the “win an election and implement your manifesto” mode of governance or the “hammer out a comprehensive coalition agreement after the election” mode. In our system, people who care a lot about a given topic need to be able to sit down at a table and hammer out some deals that take into account competing considerations. This still happens via Secret Congress, but the fact that it requires secrecy means it can’t be applied to high-profile topics that matter a lot. So we get people yelling at each other rather than listening to the competing considerations, and a lot of potentially good solutions end up orphaned.
Oh how I wish the median voter understood this. Thanks a lot for this write up MY, great post.
I'll offer another. It's good when rules are enforced 100% of the time, if its realistic to do so.
Every intersection in urban areas should probably have red light and traffic cameras, and anyone who enters an intersection after a yellow light should get a heavy fine. I don't care if there's a permissive culture around this--yellow means slow down and try to stop unless its impossible to do so.
Tracking payments and moving (even further) away from cash as a society is good, and we should make it as impossible as it can be for small businesses to evade taxes.
If you think the rules are unfair, then amend the rules, but just going around them and expecting some people not to get caught is an insane way of dodging the issues.
I was expecting to see some anti-protectionist takes here, since both parties have embraced protectionism as intellectually lazy populism. E.g. Jones Act repeal.
Probably my most 'politically homeless' take is that basically we only need two 'levels' of government - regional conglomerations and national. State level governments are basically useless as in most cases, they're either too small for truly large issues (health care) and too big for smaller issues (education).
Plus, there are simply too many local government districts in the US - look at a map of Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle etc. - there's really no reason why Homestead, SeaTac, or Long Beach should exist as separate entities. I get the historical reasons, but logistically it makes no sense.
Now, the reason why in theory, political moderates should be OK w/ regional merging of cities is that it'll lead to more moderate city governance. In a world where Long Island, Yonkers, and Scarsdale are voting, Mamdani isn't Mayor. Karen Bass probably isn't Mayor in a world where all of Orange County votes. Hell, they've done this in Canada and Rob Ford was Mayor of Toronto.
Obviously, smaller cities truly out on their own would still have their independence, but even in the US, even smaller cities usually have suburbs and exurbs that could be consolidated.
Realistically, I get why it doesn't happen - ironically, people in suburban areas of cities are happy with the governance of large cities being radical if they can have a more conservative governance in their own enclave plus taxation.
Now on the truly rural areas question, that'd be one of the few areas covered by state gov't in my area.
Of course my even more politically homeless take connects to this one and is in support of massive consolidation of school districts on the same regional lines and I know there are areas of the country people would rather see the end of the world than that.
This may be my favorite take of yours ever. Metro level sub-governance for the win!
The other big negative I would add to state level governance is that they are arbitrarily drawn to solve short term political goals at the time, and regularly lump in people that don't have that much in common.
Right - like I still point and laugh when they get upset about it because they're largely people with terrible views who actually want to impose their own worldview on me and mine, but people in rural Washington have a point (even if they overstate it) that basically they're ruled by city slickers from Seattle like me who have not a complete worldview about their needs.
Let them join Idaho (sorry City); they'd reduce their sway in the Senate, maybe pick up a House seat or two, but almost certainly at the state level they'd be king.
They'd still be sparring with Eastern Idaho and the rural areas of Southwestern Idaho, as there's differences between all of them. Spokane would take it on the chin the hardest, as they'd have to deal with all the evil state preemption bullshit Boise's had to deal with.
Yep, and in Idaho it's the inverse, and they cite a place like Washington as what they fear. Given that Spokane's about the same size as Boise, I would be curious how much it would carry the day in a hypothetical East Washington, though.
I don't see how carbon pricing is "homeless" -- about a dozen separate carbon pricing proposals have been introduced in the last 2 Congresses, most by Democrats but some with bi-partisan support. All the major environmental organizations support some form of carbon pricing (NRDC, Sierra Club, WRI, Friends of the Earth, etc.) but most don't think pricing is the ONLY policy we would need to accelerate deployment of sufficient clean energy infrastructure. Carbon pricing is not unpopular because it would be ineffective, it's unpopular because it would raise prices.
I think what Matt was saying is that carbon pricing is unpopular because it would have to raise prices by a LOT if it were to be effective at reducing emissions.
This will have been especially the case about a couple of decades ago (when I presume the rejection he refers to took place) when there were fewer non-degrowth options available to reduce carbon emissions.
Generous of you, but I think the point he was trying to make (again) is that "environmentalists" as a group are a bunch of feckless, ignorant, anti-market barbarians driven by leftist anti-growth ideologies... because they have not endorsed MY's preferred policy of pleasuring the oil and gas industries at every opportunity.
None of that is true, of course, and all of the aforementioned organizations believe that market based incentives (cap and trade, carbon taxing) have a valuable role to play. Most of the proposals that these organizations and Democrats in Congress have supported include increasing levies over time, some with an annual ratchet, which reflects the reality of increasing costs to abate as we come closer to exhausting the remaining emissions "budget".
I agree that this approach could have been much more successful if it had been adopted in 2006, but alas. However, now that renewable technologies generally -- and solar + batteries specifically -- has achieved cost parity or better with new gas generation build or expanded coal generation build almost everywhere on earth, the value of a carbon tax becomes relevant again, since it further burdens the marginal costs of FF generation, which would further reduce emissions in the electricity sectors.
The case for carbon taxes is probably weakest when it comes to gasoline, since there it would require a very large tax to shift people out of ICEVs based on fuel cost alone. However, a more modest carbon tax on gasoline would raise a ton of revenue that could be used to facilitate adoption of EVs, which is the only way we are going to make appreciable progress on CO2e from transportation, which is the single largest source of CO2e emission in the US. We could just let China manufacture and import millions of high-quality, low-priced EVs, as God and Adam Smith intended, but that would require a level of clear-eyed maturity about the failures of our legacy auto companies that neither party seems ready to embrace.
If MY's preferred policy was "pleasuring the oil and gas industries at every opportunity" then wouldn't he be a MAGA Republican rather than a neoliberal centrist Democrat?
And wouldn't any serious approach to fighting climate change have been far more difficult in 2006 than today? It was still way too late already to fight climate change by going nuclear (as the world's nuclear industries largely atrophied in the 1980s and '90s) but renewable energy technology (and especially the storage batteries needed to convert wind and solar from being mere range extenders for natural gas into truly independent power sources) was far less developed than today, with far less industrial capacity available to build it at scale.
I agree with all of these. And while we are channeling the spirit of Mark Kleiman, I would add that many states have made marijuana too accessible. It shouldn't be criminalized, but it should be expensive and inconvenient. Same with gambling.
With a ready, and in many places still existing, black market available to supply the demand, there's a pretty hard limit on how inconvenient and expensive you can make marijuana.
Do you think marijuana should be more, less, or equally inconvenient to obtain than alcohol?
We seem to have arrived at an equilibrium with alcohol where we restrict it, but also accept the evident harms from allowing it. I wonder if we would need to first legalize everywhere to really kill the black market before we can most effectively regulate it.
Not if you’re willing to crack down on the black market hard enough. In this country the republicans aren’t willing to be harsh enough either, but Singapore—and the East Asian countries more broadly—have the right of it.
There are two problems with that. The first is that even if we wanted to be as harsh as Singapore, the logistics of it are just much different in a wide open country of 330 million people that spans a continent then they are in a city-state of 6 million.
The second is that we have pretty much reached consensus that we already didn't like to costs and effects of MJ prohibition any more than we liked alcohol prohibition.
For progressives: Carbon tax, offset by a “bottoms up” tax cut (cut payroll taxes or raise the zero bracket). Gradually implement to encourage long term planning without creating an immediate burden (don’t have to scrap the Suburban today, but next car is a Prius).
For conservatives: Eliminate all the subsidies and regulations that try to micromanage the way we produce and consume energy. Let the market (driven by the carbon tax), find the optimal solutions.
My politically homeless idea: cancel all business taxes and increase personal taxes in a progressive way to at least make up for (if not exceed) the shortfall.
Sounds good in theory; however in practice business owners are able to shift a lot of their personal spending into businesses they control and the IRS can’t audit everyone so this will just end up penalizing wage-earners who just get a W2 and can’t shift things around.
One of my biggest politically homeless views is that public transport should be made more cost-efficient, and that the government should be willing to trample on some traditional sacred cows to do it.
Among other things, this means allowing transit agencies to hire foreign bus drivers and import foreign-made buses, without paying obscene taxes and/or jeopardizing FTA funding.
I would also try to reduce the amount of red tape that transit agencies need to go through in general, and that the shear number of pages of documents that agencies have to produce to get grant funding for anything is insane.
The whole system needs an overhaul, but in a country where ~90% of the national population drives everywhere, it's something that neither party has serious interest in overhauling. Republicans would rather defund transit than make it more efficient, and Democrats would rather deal with ever-escalating costs by raising taxes, rather than making it more efficient.
Where would you import bus drivers from? Central America or Europe? You're really just talking allowing low skilled immigration. It doesn't take much to learn to drive a bus. Most of the guys already here hanging sheetrock could easily and happily do it. You just need to give them green cards.
Probably all over. Central America, Europe, Asia, even Africa. There are tons of people around the world who know how to drive buses and probably drive much more stressful routes, with much higher ridership, in their home countries, than they would ever have to deal with in the U.S. Compared to back home, it would be an easier job with higher pay, but still less what native-born bus drivers make here.
Buses seem like about the best-possible use case for driving automation. They travel on fixed routes, they're given legal priority in many places, they're big and expensive so it's NBD to equip them with a bunch of cameras and LIDAR and Starlink and antennas.
Automation is the ultimate goal, but the technology isn't there yet (the tolerance for mistakes is much less for a bus carrying 30 people than for a taxi carrying 1 or 2 people). By contrast, hiring foreign bus drivers is something that could be done to improve transit service *today*. And, when the technology reaches the point where these foreign bus drivers are no longer needed, they can return to their home countries.
The real reason it's not worth the political squeeze, of course, is that, people who drive everywhere are largely insulated from the consequences, and outside of New York, there are just aren't enough voters or donors that rely on transit to be worth stepping on the ideological feathers of those that don't. It's more politically expedient to just let transit suck and tell people who don't like it to go get a car.
Nonetheless, the post is about politically homeless views, and this is mine. It is definitely politically homeless!
The only good counter-argument I've heard against it is that you still need someone on the bus to stop anti-social behavior. But a dedicated bus cop would do a much better job than a driver (who also has to drive), so you would need fewer staff than today and monitor via spot-checks or cameras.
Agreed, but my thinking was that random plainclothes officers could be a force multiplier if you don't have the money/personnel for a uniformed officer on every bus.
We polled these and, at least as we phrased them, they’re all fairly popular. Or, no less popular than the opposite. (Lots of uncertainty or neutrality.)
https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20260426-afb89-1
https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20260426-afb89-2
https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20260426-afb89-3
Counterpoint: "Not altering the long-term demographic composition of the country" is not, in fact, a legitimate concern.
I'll go for expanded guest worker programs as soon as we get rid of birthright citizenship. As long as guest workers can make anchor babies, they're not really temporary guests.
> Part of the growing dysfunction of Congress is that on a practical level, the United States’ policymaking process is meant to work via a series of ad hoc elite bargains between elected officials. There are other ways for legislatures to work, but we don’t have the institutions to support the “win an election and implement your manifesto” mode of governance or the “hammer out a comprehensive coalition agreement after the election” mode. In our system, people who care a lot about a given topic need to be able to sit down at a table and hammer out some deals that take into account competing considerations. This still happens via Secret Congress, but the fact that it requires secrecy means it can’t be applied to high-profile topics that matter a lot. So we get people yelling at each other rather than listening to the competing considerations, and a lot of potentially good solutions end up orphaned.
Oh how I wish the median voter understood this. Thanks a lot for this write up MY, great post.
Really enjoyed this 3-part series. Well done!
I'll offer another. It's good when rules are enforced 100% of the time, if its realistic to do so.
Every intersection in urban areas should probably have red light and traffic cameras, and anyone who enters an intersection after a yellow light should get a heavy fine. I don't care if there's a permissive culture around this--yellow means slow down and try to stop unless its impossible to do so.
Tracking payments and moving (even further) away from cash as a society is good, and we should make it as impossible as it can be for small businesses to evade taxes.
If you think the rules are unfair, then amend the rules, but just going around them and expecting some people not to get caught is an insane way of dodging the issues.
I agree with all of these views.
I was expecting to see some anti-protectionist takes here, since both parties have embraced protectionism as intellectually lazy populism. E.g. Jones Act repeal.
"Repeal Buy American requirements and other nonsensical contracting restrictions" is definitely an underrated homeless view.
My politically homeless opinion is that focus on efficiency is misguided at best and unlikely to produce positive results.
Probably my most 'politically homeless' take is that basically we only need two 'levels' of government - regional conglomerations and national. State level governments are basically useless as in most cases, they're either too small for truly large issues (health care) and too big for smaller issues (education).
Plus, there are simply too many local government districts in the US - look at a map of Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle etc. - there's really no reason why Homestead, SeaTac, or Long Beach should exist as separate entities. I get the historical reasons, but logistically it makes no sense.
Now, the reason why in theory, political moderates should be OK w/ regional merging of cities is that it'll lead to more moderate city governance. In a world where Long Island, Yonkers, and Scarsdale are voting, Mamdani isn't Mayor. Karen Bass probably isn't Mayor in a world where all of Orange County votes. Hell, they've done this in Canada and Rob Ford was Mayor of Toronto.
Obviously, smaller cities truly out on their own would still have their independence, but even in the US, even smaller cities usually have suburbs and exurbs that could be consolidated.
Realistically, I get why it doesn't happen - ironically, people in suburban areas of cities are happy with the governance of large cities being radical if they can have a more conservative governance in their own enclave plus taxation.
Now on the truly rural areas question, that'd be one of the few areas covered by state gov't in my area.
Of course my even more politically homeless take connects to this one and is in support of massive consolidation of school districts on the same regional lines and I know there are areas of the country people would rather see the end of the world than that.
This may be my favorite take of yours ever. Metro level sub-governance for the win!
The other big negative I would add to state level governance is that they are arbitrarily drawn to solve short term political goals at the time, and regularly lump in people that don't have that much in common.
Right - like I still point and laugh when they get upset about it because they're largely people with terrible views who actually want to impose their own worldview on me and mine, but people in rural Washington have a point (even if they overstate it) that basically they're ruled by city slickers from Seattle like me who have not a complete worldview about their needs.
Let them join Idaho (sorry City); they'd reduce their sway in the Senate, maybe pick up a House seat or two, but almost certainly at the state level they'd be king.
They'd still be sparring with Eastern Idaho and the rural areas of Southwestern Idaho, as there's differences between all of them. Spokane would take it on the chin the hardest, as they'd have to deal with all the evil state preemption bullshit Boise's had to deal with.
Yep, and in Idaho it's the inverse, and they cite a place like Washington as what they fear. Given that Spokane's about the same size as Boise, I would be curious how much it would carry the day in a hypothetical East Washington, though.
I don't see how carbon pricing is "homeless" -- about a dozen separate carbon pricing proposals have been introduced in the last 2 Congresses, most by Democrats but some with bi-partisan support. All the major environmental organizations support some form of carbon pricing (NRDC, Sierra Club, WRI, Friends of the Earth, etc.) but most don't think pricing is the ONLY policy we would need to accelerate deployment of sufficient clean energy infrastructure. Carbon pricing is not unpopular because it would be ineffective, it's unpopular because it would raise prices.
I think what Matt was saying is that carbon pricing is unpopular because it would have to raise prices by a LOT if it were to be effective at reducing emissions.
This will have been especially the case about a couple of decades ago (when I presume the rejection he refers to took place) when there were fewer non-degrowth options available to reduce carbon emissions.
Generous of you, but I think the point he was trying to make (again) is that "environmentalists" as a group are a bunch of feckless, ignorant, anti-market barbarians driven by leftist anti-growth ideologies... because they have not endorsed MY's preferred policy of pleasuring the oil and gas industries at every opportunity.
None of that is true, of course, and all of the aforementioned organizations believe that market based incentives (cap and trade, carbon taxing) have a valuable role to play. Most of the proposals that these organizations and Democrats in Congress have supported include increasing levies over time, some with an annual ratchet, which reflects the reality of increasing costs to abate as we come closer to exhausting the remaining emissions "budget".
I agree that this approach could have been much more successful if it had been adopted in 2006, but alas. However, now that renewable technologies generally -- and solar + batteries specifically -- has achieved cost parity or better with new gas generation build or expanded coal generation build almost everywhere on earth, the value of a carbon tax becomes relevant again, since it further burdens the marginal costs of FF generation, which would further reduce emissions in the electricity sectors.
The case for carbon taxes is probably weakest when it comes to gasoline, since there it would require a very large tax to shift people out of ICEVs based on fuel cost alone. However, a more modest carbon tax on gasoline would raise a ton of revenue that could be used to facilitate adoption of EVs, which is the only way we are going to make appreciable progress on CO2e from transportation, which is the single largest source of CO2e emission in the US. We could just let China manufacture and import millions of high-quality, low-priced EVs, as God and Adam Smith intended, but that would require a level of clear-eyed maturity about the failures of our legacy auto companies that neither party seems ready to embrace.
If MY's preferred policy was "pleasuring the oil and gas industries at every opportunity" then wouldn't he be a MAGA Republican rather than a neoliberal centrist Democrat?
And wouldn't any serious approach to fighting climate change have been far more difficult in 2006 than today? It was still way too late already to fight climate change by going nuclear (as the world's nuclear industries largely atrophied in the 1980s and '90s) but renewable energy technology (and especially the storage batteries needed to convert wind and solar from being mere range extenders for natural gas into truly independent power sources) was far less developed than today, with far less industrial capacity available to build it at scale.
Ditch magical thinking, think things through, embrace actual progress - works for me.
I agree with all of these. And while we are channeling the spirit of Mark Kleiman, I would add that many states have made marijuana too accessible. It shouldn't be criminalized, but it should be expensive and inconvenient. Same with gambling.
With a ready, and in many places still existing, black market available to supply the demand, there's a pretty hard limit on how inconvenient and expensive you can make marijuana.
Do you think marijuana should be more, less, or equally inconvenient to obtain than alcohol?
We seem to have arrived at an equilibrium with alcohol where we restrict it, but also accept the evident harms from allowing it. I wonder if we would need to first legalize everywhere to really kill the black market before we can most effectively regulate it.
And not just black markets, but grey markets where it's legal in other jurisdictions.
Not if you’re willing to crack down on the black market hard enough. In this country the republicans aren’t willing to be harsh enough either, but Singapore—and the East Asian countries more broadly—have the right of it.
There are two problems with that. The first is that even if we wanted to be as harsh as Singapore, the logistics of it are just much different in a wide open country of 330 million people that spans a continent then they are in a city-state of 6 million.
The second is that we have pretty much reached consensus that we already didn't like to costs and effects of MJ prohibition any more than we liked alcohol prohibition.
Outline of a Grand Political Bargain on climate:
For progressives: Carbon tax, offset by a “bottoms up” tax cut (cut payroll taxes or raise the zero bracket). Gradually implement to encourage long term planning without creating an immediate burden (don’t have to scrap the Suburban today, but next car is a Prius).
For conservatives: Eliminate all the subsidies and regulations that try to micromanage the way we produce and consume energy. Let the market (driven by the carbon tax), find the optimal solutions.
That gets you libertarians and both remaining free market Republicans, but the MAGA wing of the party wants to micromanage private businesses.
My politically homeless idea: cancel all business taxes and increase personal taxes in a progressive way to at least make up for (if not exceed) the shortfall.
Sounds good in theory; however in practice business owners are able to shift a lot of their personal spending into businesses they control and the IRS can’t audit everyone so this will just end up penalizing wage-earners who just get a W2 and can’t shift things around.
One of my biggest politically homeless views is that public transport should be made more cost-efficient, and that the government should be willing to trample on some traditional sacred cows to do it.
Among other things, this means allowing transit agencies to hire foreign bus drivers and import foreign-made buses, without paying obscene taxes and/or jeopardizing FTA funding.
I would also try to reduce the amount of red tape that transit agencies need to go through in general, and that the shear number of pages of documents that agencies have to produce to get grant funding for anything is insane.
The whole system needs an overhaul, but in a country where ~90% of the national population drives everywhere, it's something that neither party has serious interest in overhauling. Republicans would rather defund transit than make it more efficient, and Democrats would rather deal with ever-escalating costs by raising taxes, rather than making it more efficient.
Where would you import bus drivers from? Central America or Europe? You're really just talking allowing low skilled immigration. It doesn't take much to learn to drive a bus. Most of the guys already here hanging sheetrock could easily and happily do it. You just need to give them green cards.
Probably all over. Central America, Europe, Asia, even Africa. There are tons of people around the world who know how to drive buses and probably drive much more stressful routes, with much higher ridership, in their home countries, than they would ever have to deal with in the U.S. Compared to back home, it would be an easier job with higher pay, but still less what native-born bus drivers make here.
No way is it worth the political squeeze to hire foreign bus drivers. It's hard to think of a proposal more toxic to both the left and the right.
Certainly the play is autonomous busses instead?
Buses seem like about the best-possible use case for driving automation. They travel on fixed routes, they're given legal priority in many places, they're big and expensive so it's NBD to equip them with a bunch of cameras and LIDAR and Starlink and antennas.
Automation is the ultimate goal, but the technology isn't there yet (the tolerance for mistakes is much less for a bus carrying 30 people than for a taxi carrying 1 or 2 people). By contrast, hiring foreign bus drivers is something that could be done to improve transit service *today*. And, when the technology reaches the point where these foreign bus drivers are no longer needed, they can return to their home countries.
The real reason it's not worth the political squeeze, of course, is that, people who drive everywhere are largely insulated from the consequences, and outside of New York, there are just aren't enough voters or donors that rely on transit to be worth stepping on the ideological feathers of those that don't. It's more politically expedient to just let transit suck and tell people who don't like it to go get a car.
Nonetheless, the post is about politically homeless views, and this is mine. It is definitely politically homeless!
The only good counter-argument I've heard against it is that you still need someone on the bus to stop anti-social behavior. But a dedicated bus cop would do a much better job than a driver (who also has to drive), so you would need fewer staff than today and monitor via spot-checks or cameras.
I've wondered if randomly-assigned plainclothes officers would be helpful here, like Bus Marshals.
I think a uniformed officer would be even better to deter bad behavior before it starts.
Agreed, but my thinking was that random plainclothes officers could be a force multiplier if you don't have the money/personnel for a uniformed officer on every bus.
I think we should raise wool output by increasing the shear number of sheep.
[I suppose this really needs sarcasm tags lest someone take it as an actual proposal rather than just being amused by a typo.]
Ewe ought to be ashamed of yourself for making such a ba-a-a-ad pun.